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Space Rocks, DARPA & Student Orgs

I'm taking a break from Elite Modeling School while all sorts of other things are taking my time. The great thing about being in thesis prep is that I only have one class and ostensibly that would leave me with a lot of free time. However, the magic of grad school is that your workload expands like steam to fill whatever amount of free time you have. Thus, it still seems like I have little free time and find myself always running between tasks.

Lately one of the things I've been focusing on is a conference that AsiaGSD, a student group here at Harvard, is organizing for next Saturday November, 10th. We have been working on this since last Spring so it's pretty exciting to see everything actually coming together. One of the interesting parts of the experience for me has been to learn a little bit about how student groups work at the GSD.

Whereas other schools fund things like receptions after lectures, the GSD takes a more distributed model by passing a decent amount of cash to student groups which then organize themselves to develop the social program of the school. Honestly I can't say whether I like this more than regular, normal, you-can-count on it wine & cheese type events but at the very least it's an interesting experiment. It reminds me of DARPA's approach to R&D funding which filters cash into the private market to distribute efforts.

This also means that when you want to sponsor an event that costs more than the limited funds that the school hands out, you have to raise those funds yourself. We've been furiously writing grant requests to all sorts of organizations for months now and it is starting to pay off, literally. In one week's time we will be hosting some of the awesomest designers in motion graphics, animation, comics, and publishing, just to name a few. This is going to be fun.

So, I will be posting more about the conference soon, but for now I leave you with a draft of the logo drawn by Alexander "fish" Bohn (and briefly gussied up by me):